blivet What’s a blivet, you ask? According to the site’s author, a blivet is 10 pounds of crap in a 5-lb bag — a pretty messy problem! In this particular case, though, blivet is the weblog of a Vegas-based archaeologist, buddhist, and co-procrastinator of blog entries. Although blog entries are light, when he finds the time, he says some pretty interesting stuff. Like this post from February, describing his take on the reaction to Mel Gibson’s S&M party, The Passion of the Christ:
Judging by the way reactions are to this movie, from yea to nay, it would seem that the rejection of the post-enlightenment world is alive and well in the popular culture of the West. All observations elsewhere of Mr. Gibson (and his father’s) politics and faith aside, this work would seem to be the very call for a return to the world of divisive theology. To only lightly reference the central teachings of Christianity such as the Sermon on the Mount while focusing on the final part of the Passion is to advocate a return to that ‘good old-time’ Medieval faith and a summary rejection of the central teachings that lead to the faith today.
Hopefully he’ll find more time to blog in the future, if the freaking heat out here doesn’t kill him. People do archaeology in this weather? [Continue reading]
Alas, a Blog What am I gonna say about Alas? It’s one of the big fish, with a huge community of commenters and cross-linkers, hardly an unknown player. But such is the task I’ve appointed myself… Alas, once the domain of the punctuationally-named Ampersand, has transmogrified into a full-on group blog. Although — as expected from a group of posters with different interests and specialties — subjects cover range pretty widely, I go there for the commentary of gender, sexuality, and feminism, which is, regardless of who’s posting, uniformly excellent. Even when I disagree, I’m generally impressed with the thoughtfulness of the posts, and have more than once seen incredible exchanges unfold in the comments threads, which can often top 100 or even 200 posts. Plus, the drawings are really cool. [Continue reading]
A three-part program for structuring arguments with representatives of the Right: Do your Homework, Stay Cool, and Keep Organizing. Each section includes tips and advice that is really just good debating sense, whatever part ofthe political spectrum your opponent/ discussant calls home. [Continue reading]
In Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, Wade Davis (he of The Serpent and the Rainbow fame) describes the tenuous ways in which death has been defined, historically and even into the present day. It’s a frightening account, filled with examples gleaned from the modern media, of folks who have been declared dead and consigned to the morgue or funeral home, only to suddenly recover and be not-so-dead anymore. Take this example in China. A guy kidnaps a couple folks and is holding them hostage on a window ledge. Some enterprising cop hits him with two shots, point-blank, to the head, knocking him off the ledge and to the pavement 5 stories below. I mean, that’s some serious dead-making action! And yet…
The paper said his body was put in a coffin and taken to a funeral home, where it was to be refrigerated before being cremated. But funeral home workers heard a groan on opening the coffin and were shocked to find the man still alive. They rushed him to hospital.
Makes you want to write a “living will” for after you die, doesn’t it? Something like “In the event of my death, give it a few weeks before you bury me alive, ok?” [Continue reading]
I forgot I wanted to include this quote in my previous post on boxing, found on the ThinkExist quotation site:
“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.” –Mohammed Ali
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Anne Galloway: Purse Lip Square Jaw Anne Galloway is (as far as I can make out, and among other things I’m sure) an ethnographer of architecture and the architectural — that is, she’s concerned with spaces and places, a concern I share and have written on a lot here, though far more amateurishly than Galloway. Her writing can be a little academic and dense at times, though giventhe complexity of the subject matter, I doubt that’s avoidable. Give it some effort, it pays off — as it does in the bit I excerpted below, from a post last month on “restricting mobility”:
As part of my research on tensions between mobility and stability, I’ve become particularly interested in ways we attempt to control the movement of people – especially given the well-established Western (and especially American) tradition of associating mobility with freedom. … Coming at the question from a different direction, I’ve been thinking about how photographs stabilise the movement (arguably the essence) of parkour and skateboarding. And even how old daguerreotypes were incapable of capturing movement. But mostly I’ve been thinking about how settled people have historically reacted to nomads. For example, under the Israeli state the life of the Bedouin has changed dramatically, and the Irish government has long tried to fix the itinerant problem associated with Irish Traveller culture. Mongolian nomads are increasingly moving to the city, but urban infrastructure and policy – as well as nomadic cultural values – are not adapting well to this shift.
I cut a bit out — you’re sposed to follow the link and read it, silly — which deals with stuff like “no skateboarding” signs and dress codes, military baricades and riot control strategies, and so on. Galloway links together a whole spectrum of mobility-denials , from the private strategies we use to keep those crazy kids off our walls to the machinations of nations and their efforts to sedentarize people who have, often unwillingly and even unwittingly, become national subjects. Purse Lip Square Jaw is one of those sites that makes you glad to live in the age when humanity decided to blog. It’s the kind of work that, a decade ago, you’d only be exposed to in hallway chats at universities and professional meetings, and once in a while in an academic journal (which while certainly good for what they are sposed to be good for, do little to convey the process of ideas developing and growing). [Continue reading]
Gamespy has a series of over two dozen articles detailing the history of Dungeons & Dragons, the game that, for many a geek, dweeb, and nerd (now better-known by titles like CTO or guru), was both the source and stigma of high school ostracism. The history told in the Gamespy series is pretty fascinating — a lot of stuff I remember as rumour and speculation is put into order in this surprisingly modern tale of market domination, poor business models, and interpersonal rivalries. In the end, though, D&D was always about a kind of social interaction (ironically given it’s reputation as a refuge for social rejects), which might give us just a small insight into why so many ex- or longterm D&D’ers, now fully embedded in the tech industry, are so interested in the social possibilities presented by new technologies.
It’s a scene familiar to many across the world. A small group of people sitting around a table littered with strangely shaped dice, thick books, and pieces of paper filled with arcane statistics. It’s a Dungeons & Dragons game, and while the rules may have changed a bit since it was first published, the social interactions between the players haven’t.
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anil dash Anil Dash is a VP at SixApart, the pleasant folk who brought us Movable Type blogging software and the TypePad hosted blogging service. His site deals mostly with technical stuff in a fairly engaging, often humourous, and sometimes just plain fun way. F’rinstance, when a couple search optimization organizations decided to hold a contest with prizes for whoever could get their site listed first on Google for the keywords “Nigritude Ultramarine”, Dash — though not a search optimization pro — jumped right in, and even won. The whole exercise was not just to show his contempt for the search optimization industry (though there does seem to be a little bit of that) but to show the potential of a strong network built through interpersonal contact — the opposite of the corporate mindset in which “thinking outside the box” means not radically reenvisioning a system but merely learning how to “game” it. When not discussing the ins and outs of web services or the history of failed apps bundled with Office, Dash offers a more personal look into the life of a tech professional. This seems to be a theme among techie blogs — zigzagging back and forth between critiquing the latest XHTML standards or describing object-to-SOAP transformations or some equally obscure thing you had no idea even existed and then a moment later describing the all-too-human heartache of leaving a city one loves and the anticipation of moving into a new home. Maybe because blogging has become a way to not only broadcast but to build and maintain a network of like-minded people, bloggers like Dash feel comfortable detailing the whole spread of their life-spectrum, knowing that their regular readers know and understand boththe arcane and the everyday details. I’ve tended to avoid the personal on my own site, with a handful of exceptions — I mean, I hope I have a very personal and personable “voice”, but I’ve rarely delved into the details of my private life. Which is a bit odd, since the bloggers I like best tend to be the ones who leaven their political or technical commentary with the day-to-days — something for me to think on, I guess. [Continue reading]
AKMA’s Random Thoughts AKMA is, believe it or not, a postmodern priest! OK, I don’t know if he’s a priest or minister or what — the picture of him on his faculty bio shows him in a collar, and Jew that I am, I don’t know which clergy wear collars and which don’t, so to me, he’s a priest. Anyway, a postmodernist, with what looks to be about a half-dozen books of postmodern biblical and theological analysis to his name (where does he find the time?!). Not a hell-fire and damnation kinda clergyman, though — AKMA writes with a sensitivity and compassion I bet you wish your clergy had. On the topic of the “emergent church”, for instance, he writes:
The emergent leaders I’ve met want no part of a rope-’em-in-for-Jesus membership head count game; they’ve stopped cold, asked the basic question of why people who love God and want to follow Jesus should do it in bunches, and are trying to see what answers make sense on the ground. I’m not a part of that endeavor, and I’m probably misconstruing it in various ways, but as far as I understand it, I respect the impulse and the ways it’s being played out around us. Institutional spokespeople (like me) should mostly just quiet down and let the Spirit speak, aye or nay, through the ministries of hard-working, committed leaders such as these.
Given the way that many religious folk, clergy or no, respond to any sign of difference within or without their congregations, AKMA’s openness and willingness to exptend respect even to folks whose take on spiritualism he doesn’t personally agree with is truly a beautiful thing, and for that, I extend the same respect to the man himself. Even if he is a Christian. :-) [Continue reading]
action figures sold separately I first encountered the action figures gang back in April of 2003 when elihu, one of the action figures I suppose, seconded my suggestion that “fleischering” be added to the national vocabulary to describe the act of not only talking around a question but not even pretending one is dealing with the same topic they were asked about. The site’s posting history is spotty (as is mine — no finger-pointing here) and their last post was in February — apparently they got so worked up about the whole gay marriage thing in San Francisco that they quite forgot about the whole blogging phenomenon for 6 months or so. Actually, the site was a part of the movementbuilding.org family of websites, and it may just be that the group blog was forsaken in favor of the various other projects they take part in. Maybe I should link to some of the other parts of the site — but there’s no clear indication that action figures will not, as sometime in the future, again be sold separately… [Continue reading]
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